


Accommodation

by story_monger



Category: Sense8 (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Friendship, Gen, Post-Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-12
Updated: 2015-07-12
Packaged: 2018-04-09 01:22:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4328394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/story_monger/pseuds/story_monger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Capheus still sees the expressions a man makes when a machete rips through his chest. He knows what lungs sound like when they’re popped open. He knows that blood is hot when it sprays from a jugular and he knows that it tastes salty when it lands on his lips and tongue.</p><p>Capheus, after the battle</p>
            </blockquote>





	Accommodation

Their neighbor brings Capheus and his mother the news of a warehouse full of dead Superpower men. He describes the severed limbs and heads with fluttering hands and a stuttering, self-aware smile. Nothing left of them, the neighbor says, it was like a demon went through there. Capheus’ gut twists. His mother looks sidelong at him, but something in her son’s countenance makes her keep her peace. It’s not as if any of this can stay a secret, Capheus knows. The bullet-riddled bus will be evidence enough.

When the neighbor is gone and supper finished, Capheus curls up on the couch while his mother pulls out her mending work. Her muttering and humming sifts through the home like dusty sunlight.

Capheus is dizzy with the events of the last few weeks, and his mother’s voice seems the only solid thing he can grasp onto. He thinks that he ought to be dancing and singing his praises to God, the ancestors, whomever has set him on this path. His mother will have medicine; his bus will be repaired.

“That’s all I ask,” Capheus had told Silas Kabaka in Jela’s yard, as his veins still thrummed with adrenaline and the blood grew tacky on his skin. He had wanted to sob with the truth of the statement, but it wasn’t a weakness he could afford then. “My livelihood and my mother’s health,” he’d said. “That’s fair, is it not? The lives of your family for the lives of mine. But then our debts are all settled, and I do not wish to do any more business with you.”

It was, perhaps, the only time in his life Capheus could have spoken so brazenly to a crime lord. But bloodied and shaken, with his daughter clutching his leg, Kabaka had agreed.

Capheus had felt a flicker of Wolfgang in the back of his head. Not enough to bring him there, but perhaps the nature of the conversation was so familiar as to draw him in. _You can demand more,_ Wolfgang had said in a bare whisper of a thought. _You have him at your mercy._

 _I don’t want more,_ Capheus had thought back, baffled and exhausted, and Wolfgang disappeared in a spasm of something that tasted like embarrassment. For a split second, Capheus heard a stale, overworked memory-voice.

“…und für mehr kämpfen.” Fight for more. Capheus remembered the stink of his father’s breath and the creaking of the floorboards and—

And then Capheus was back in the warmth of a Nairobi afternoon, and Kabaka was saying things like, “Of course,” and “It will be done.”

In the present, Capheus shifts on the couch, pulling his blanket up to his chin and listening to his mother mutter to herself as she examines her stitches. He is not yet ready to explain to her why she will not need to worry about medicine ever again. And although it is a great blessing, a miracle, he is even less prepared to describe the way that he knows a woman in India is distractedly trying to read a novel her mother has recommended, or that a man in Mexico is scanning the entertainment news websites with his heart in his throat, waiting to see his name. And most of all, he does not know how to explain that he and a Korean warrior woman are responsible for the warehouse of dead bodies.

(Capheus still sees the expressions a man makes when a machete rips through his chest. He knows what lungs sound like when they’re popped open. He knows that blood is hot when it sprays from a jugular and he knows that it tastes salty when it lands on his lips and tongue.)

(He also knows how to love this taste, this precise thrust of muscles. Sun’s adrenaline and fierce joy had been left behind in Capheus’ veins, and he’d been obliged to soak in them.)

Capheus squeezes his eyes shut and the phrase thunders from the back of his head: _I killed them._

It is, he finds, a very different thing to watch this sort of thing on TV, to watch another commit such violence, and to complete the action with his own hands. The difference is so dizzying as to make a sour taste flood his mouth, and for a moment he tastes the blood on his lips again, even though he’d scrubbed it away yesterday. (He’d scrubbed so hard his skin had felt raw.)

Almost immediately, he worries that Sun might have picked up his thoughts. But a quick check confirms that she is deep in sleep, curled up on a thin mattress in a cold cell. He aches for her, and he decides that when she wakes up, he’ll invite her to Nairobi so she can feel warm sun on their skin.

“That’s a wonderful idea,” a soft voice says. “She’ll appreciate that.”

Capheus looks up, and Riley stands a few feet away. She looks pale and drawn still, but perhaps not so much as she did when Capheus last visited her. He grins before he can help himself, and Riley grins back as she crosses the room and clambers onto the couch beside him.

A flicker, and they’re in a dim, swaying space that smells like salt. They’re curled up together on a cot. Across from them, Capheus sees the outline of Will’s face.

“How is he?” Capheus murmurs.

“He’s healthy, physically speaking,” Riley says. “He’s…he’s safe.”

Capheus bites at his bottom lip and, carefully, extends a thread of thought toward Will. He’s immediately enveloped in a silver-gray mist. Somewhere, somehow, he senses the shape of Will, like feeling a rock in a muddy river with his feet. He gives Will a lingering touch and backs out again. Riley is waiting for him. Capheus can feel her love for Will pouring from her like water, and it seeds something bright inside his chest. He throws an arm over her shoulders and kisses her temple.

“We all make a very good team,” he tells her. “We’ll be able to bring him back.”

“Ah,” Riley sighs, and her face grows lighter. “I’m glad you’re here to tell me wonderful things like that, Capheus.” The hope and doubt churn inside her, and Capheus decides that he understands why she appeared to him.

“You’re feeling confused too,” Riley tells Capheus, shifting to look at him. They’re back on the couch in Nairobi. Capheus shrugs and on impulse lays his head on Riley’s shoulder. They sift back the boat and Will.

“I’m not…” he starts, then stops. “I am grateful. Beyond imagining, I am grateful. I am alive. We are all alive. My mother will have medicine and I will be able to keep working.” He exhales. “I am blessed. I truly am.”

“Yes,” Riley agrees. “But you are also upset.” A long pause in which Capheus doesn’t answer.

“I know that they were criminals,” Capheus said. “But I am…it weighs on me that my happiness has come from so many men dying. But to be distressed is to disrespect Sun and what she did for me. I would be dead if it weren’t for her.”

“I understand,” says a new voice, and Kala is at the end of the cot, picking at her fingernails like a nervous child. They are on her bright yellow bed; the novel is abandoned on the floor. “I’ve lived a kind life, and I don’t much understand violence and death,” Kala says. “I hate it and yet…”

The three of them are swept under a flash of gunpowder and explosives. Kala’s thin, high fear. Wolfgang’s roaring hate. When they resurface in Kala’s bedroom, the faint scent of incense is almost sickening.

“And yet you understand,” Capheus says. Kala scoots closer to take Riley and Capheus’ hands in her own. They are back in the boat. Water slaps the hull in a rhythm.

“It’ll happen again,” Riley says. “Of course it will. With the sorts of people coming after us.”

Kala’s lips thin. “I think,” she says after a moment. “We will have to be large enough to accommodate it.”

“What do you mean?” Riley asks.

“We’ll have to accept the battles that might happen,” Kala says, her thumb grazing over Capheus’ knuckles. “Because that is the nature of our lives now, I think. But we won’t have to get lost in the hate and the fear and the loss. Not if we keep one another above water.” They are silent, mulling over Kala’s words. Capheus finds himself smiling to her.

“You are a wise one,” he says. Kala ducks her head, and Capheus laughs when he feels her warm spill of embarrassed pleasure.

A fresh sensation sweeps over them, and Capheus recognizes that in Mexico City, Hernando has laid a hand on Lito’s shoulder and told him to leave the websites alone and come take a jog with him instead. Lito’s mind becomes a flood of sunlight. Capheus heaves a sigh without meaning to.

“Have you thought of something good?” his mother asks, and then Capheus is alone on his couch again. He feels a ghost of a pressure on his right palm and on his temple. He still smells salt and incense.

“Yes,” Capheus says honestly. “Something wonderful.”

***

When the Van Damn bus opens for business once again, the seats are packed and Jela is practically dancing. Capheus spends the day belting the songs that Nomi is listening to while she cleans her apartment. Sometimes she pops into existence beside him, still holding a rag, and the bus is always too crowded and noisy for anyone to mind that the driver is having a conversation with thin air.

Capheus keeps a light touch on Sun’s presence, but all that day she is distant and absorbed. He finally gets a clearer glimpse of her in early evening, when Capheus has dropped Jela off and is driving the bus to its overnight station. She is somewhere dark and cold — which is the norm for Sun these days — and her anger is a simmering, desperate thing. Capheus does hesitate for a moment. But then he presses forward and nudges her with a sense of the hot air and familiar wheel under his hands.

She comes to him, driven by her desire to leave behind her cell, and when she appears several seats behind Capheus, she has red-rimmed eyes and streaks of moisture on a blotchy face. Capheus doesn’t say anything until he’s parked his bus. He pulls the keys out of the ignition, sticks them in his pocket, then makes his way to the seat where Sun sits. He slides in beside her and bumps her shoulder. She tilts her head, and he feels the lump in her throat, her scratchy eyes.

“I have for you,” Capheus says. “An all-expenses paid bus tour of Nairobi’s night life.” He makes a wide sweeping gesture. “And you will not need to say a single word the whole time.”

Sun sniffs, is embarrassed, then lets Capheus escort her to the front of the bus. Capheus restarts the ignition and rumbles out of the bus lot. He talks. Capheus did this often in the nadir of his mother’s illness, when sometimes it felt like the only thing keeping her with the living was Capheus’ chatter about anything and everything he could grab hold of. This, he thinks, is not so different. Something inside Sun is broken, and throughout the night Capheus catches echoes of a man in a suit whom he both despises and loves, talking about a hose connected to an exhaust pipe, and he feels his chest crack open over and over. When Sun begins to cry again, he feels the tears drip from his cheekbones. They’re hot and salty when they land on his lips.

When Sun speaks at last, they have finished their third circuit of the city and the streets are as empty as Capheus ever sees them.

“Thank you,” she says, her voice oddly small.

“Ah,” Capheus waves a hand. “A ride is very little. You saved my life, Sun, I am forever in your debt.” He doesn’t catch the tail end of that thought in time, and he feels Sun tense when she is brushed by his unspoken sense of, _I’d rather be having nightmares of dead men than be dead myself._

She turns to him, a bit of her black hair sticking to her cheek, and he feels a sinking shame.

“No,” she blurts. “No, don’t be…you’re being too hard on yourself.” She fiddles with the sleeve of her prison uniform. “There’s no shame in being affected by…it was violent, of course it was.”

Capheus turns his head a little. “I don’t want you to think me ungrateful,” he says.

Sun wipes at her eyes with a sleeve. “I know you’re grateful,” she says. “It pours from you. And I also feel how you’re grieving for those men, and it…” She shifts, making her seat squeal. “Capheus, your compassion for the world is massive, and I worry it will hurt you one day, but it also makes you courageous. It is a daring thing to try to love a twisted world. Me, I try to fight it. And sometimes I don’t know whether it…whether it does any good.”

Capheus takes a turn slowly and thinks over this. “Maybe it’s best to take an equal measure of loving and fighting,” he suggests. He reaches over to thumb away the tears gathering on Sun’s eyelashes. “The only trick is knowing which is best for a moment.”

Sun wrinkles her nose a little and bounces as the bus hits a pothole. “Then tell me,” she says. “Should I try to love the man who killed my father or fight my baby brother?”

Capheus sucks his teeth and shakes his head. “That is a hard, hard choice,” he says. “I think that I would like to forgive family, but maybe it’s something you should ask the others about about. Kala especially. I think she understands these ideas of morality better than you or me.”

They both feel the starburst of emotion, and they whirl around as one. Capheus catches a bare glimpse of blond hair and hard pale eyes before Wolfgang is gone again, leaving behind a haze of hospital smells. Capheus stops the bus and stares over at Sun. She looks less stricken.

“He had a choice like I did,” she tells Capheus, shrugging lightly. “And now he is living with the consequences. I’m not surprised that he heard us.”

“I suppose not,” Capheus says, nudging the bus forward again.

He keeps driving. They both remain silent now, and Capheus feels the exhaustion start to seep into his limbs and eyes. Sun does have to leave at last, when the sky is grainy with dawn. For a moment, he hears the stringent alarm that wakes the inmates. He can hear her cellmates’ groans and shuffles, and he feels the scratch of cheap cloth on his skin.

“That was nice,” Sun says. She reaches out to squeeze his arm, and then she is gone. Capheus is alone on the bus, though he hears Riley’s music in the distance and can smell hot pavement from Lito. He lets the bus roll to a standstill and raises his hands over his head, reveling in the way his muscles stretch and warm. Over the tin roofs, the sun is coming out.


End file.
